Yahoo! King of The Apps at CES 2014

CES 2014 ends tomorrow and so far the media attention has mainly been focused on the big hardware launches: Samsung’s Galaxy Tab Pros or the LG G Flex smartphone. However, for Yahoo!, the big focus has been on apps.

Back in March, Yahoo! bought Summly, a news-site aggregation app developed by an Australian-British teenager for a reported $30 million. That’s a heck a lot of money so Yahoo! obviously saw huge potential for the app. Now we’re finally getting to see the results of the project, as Yahoo! has now launched News Digest, a news summary app that is based on Summly.

Yahoo News Digest aims to provide quick summaries of the day’s news to its readers. It delivers ‘Digests’ – outlines of eight or nine of that day’s top stories – to your phone twice daily, with articles that have been selected for you.

Nick D’Aloisio, Yahoo!’s Product Manager for Mobile and Emerging Products and the original creator of the Summly app, said on the company’s blog that News Digest uses complex algorithms to condense down articles to their main points and this meant that more people were likely to read the content. It’s not currently clear how Yahoo! will decide what stories are of interest to ‘you’, if they’ll just be the top stories of the day or if they’ll be personalised based on a user’s interests.

Yahoo! also announced that it has bought Android app Aviate. The app’s technology redesigns your home screen based on the time of day or your location to show you the apps you need most at that time or place. So if you only read the news sites on your commute to work in the morning or play games on your lunch break, Aviate would reorganise your home screen to make those apps easier to find.

Aviate has gone into private beta but if you want to test it out, the first 25,000 who use the code “YAHOO” will be able to download it too.